One of the great secrets of losing weight is that you can do so by doing regular light exercise. Walking is an excellent form that brings many health benefits while helping you to shed those excess pounds of fat in an enjoyable and simple way.

As long as you do enough of it on a daily basis and combine it with eating a healthy diet that is not overloaded with calories, then you will not only lose the excess weight you may have gained over time, but you will then continue to keep it off and maintain a healthy body weight in the long term. One such type of light exercise is something we all do but often simply do not do enough of is going out for a walk.

How Does Walking Help You Lose Weight?

Merely strolling along is not enough to provide any useful benefits. But when you walk with purpose, that is you walk fairly quickly and in a manner that raises your heart rate and makes you breathe a little harder than normal, then a process is set up whereby your body will start to burn calories. This is how it works:

As you begin walking at a faster pace than average, your leg muscles have to work that much harder to maintain the quicker pace. In doing so, they demand more of the sugars that are dissolved in the bloodstream which they use as fuel to produce the energy they need to keep working at this elevated pace.

Now while this is not as strenuous as working out in a gym or doing aerobic exercises, it still makes the muscles work hard enough to start burning the calories that are contained in the blood sugar. Merely taking a stroll for a few minutes at a time will not produce much of an effect, although it is better than nothing. Here is the secret weight loss side of walking:

Pick Up the Pace

It is walking at this elevated pace for a longer period of time that you will start to get the benefits from this form of exercise. When we do any exercise that raises the heart rate and breathing level, we start to burn calories, albeit slowly or quickly depending upon how strenuous the level is of what we're doing.

When walking, that level is quite low, but calories are still being burned. As the blood sugar is used up in providing the muscles that are doing the work with fuel, more has to be provided for the muscles to continue working. This usually happens after about 20 minutes of continued exercise at whatever level of strenuousness it may be. The body is forced to provide more fuel and it gets it from the store of fuel it has saved up in the fat cells.

The Secret of Walking to Get in Shape

Yes, that is the secret part of this that not too many people know about!

When you walk at a fast pace for 20 minutes or more, your body switches from using the sugars dissolved in the bloodstream to using the sugars stored up in fat, meaning that you start to deplete your body's fat store. Now when you are overweight, that fat store can be quite substantial and it will take some time to deplete it all to the point where your body has regained its nice slim shape and ideal weight.

The trick is to walk for longer than this. Up to an hour or more is far more beneficial and will cause much more fat to be burned. But by doing this every day, you will reach a stage where not only has your fitness level increased considerably, your body will have been toned up and your weight reduced. And this is one of the great, albeit not so well kept secret slimming tips that work!

Slow and Steady

Now this is not for anyone who wants to see fast weight loss results, because it is not fast. In fact it is better described as a slow weight loss solution! But a solution it certainly is and a valid and useful one to know about.

It means you can lose weight without needing to get stuck into vigorous or strenuous exercises if you do not want to, but can lose the weight by doing something that you will find you enjoy doing. That's because there is nothing quite like getting outdoors into the fresh air every day to walk wherever the road takes you.

You'll get to know your neighborhood better than ever, meet new friends along the way and boost your health at the same time. There is nothing quite like it and if you live in a hilly area, that is even better because going for a walk up and down hills makes your leg muscles work even harder to burn those excess calories even faster!

So consider taking up walking as a simple, enjoyable and viable form of exercise that will, in the long term, aid your progress to achieving the goal of a slimmer, fitter and lighter body!